Map & Compass: An Interview with Jeff McWilliams

Q: Did you grow up doing outdoorsy activities, or did that come later in life?

A little of both. I grew up in Alpena, and since my family didn't have a ton of money, a lot of our summer vacations were what we'd now call camping — my dad would drive us out to state land in Northern Michigan and we'd camp for a week and just goof off. It wasn't structured. I was in Cub Scouts but never made it to Boy Scouts, so big organized trips weren't really on my radar.

In high school, a couple buddies and I started doing our own hikes and campouts in the woods around us. In retrospect, the gear we dragged along was horrendous — we didn't know what we didn't know, and we were buying stuff from army-navy surplus stores instead of anything actually designed for backpacking.

My wife and I even tried a camping trip on South Manitou with our daughter when she was six, and we were miserable — heavy gear, bad food, a hot sweaty weekend with sand flies everywhere. We bailed early.

It wasn't until the end of 2007 that I found the Solar Outdoors Club. The first thing I went to was their holiday party, and the first workshop I took was the beginner backpacking workshop. Suddenly I was around people who actually knew what they were doing, and I got to make friends while learning. Some of the people I met in 2008 I'm still doing trips with today. That's really when it clicked for me — through the club we took map and compass, a search and rescue workshop, all these outdoorsy skills, and I fell in love with it.

Q: How old were you when you really got into the outdoors?

By the time we did our first big trip — Isle Royale for seven days with six of us — that was 2009, and I was 39. So definitely a late bloomer. There's some envy of people who discover this stuff in their 20s and have decades ahead of them to check off every park. I'm still playing catch-up.

Q: How did you first find the Solar Outdoors Club?

I stumbled on it on the web. Social media was still in its infancy, so I think I was searching something like "outdoorsy clubs" on Google or Yahoo. I was at some transition point in my life, looking for something else to do, found their site or a post about a monthly meeting, and just decided to go check it out.

Q: How did you go from being a club member to becoming an instructor?

It happened pretty quickly, honestly. I showed a knack early on for map and compass — I'm a total map and compass nerd, and that's the main workshop I lead. The club has always looked for people with outdoor leadership potential and [they] asked…I said sure, partly as a way to give back since the club had taught me so much. I started helping as an instructor for the map and compass class around 2010 or 2011, and I've just kept doing it since.

Q: Can you walk me through the format of the map and compass workshop?

The lectures typically run three evenings — one night a week for three weeks. Then we have a weekend where we rent a rustic cabin at Waterloo Recreation Area as our base camp. We do a bunch of hands-on work out in the woods, and it all culminates on Sunday morning: each team gets a paper map with four flags marked on it, plus a volunteer who comes along in case anyone actually gets lost, and [each person] has to navigate to each flag in a specific order.

It's a lot of work and a lot of lecture — we go deep and try to teach the material in different ways since people learn technical stuff differently. Other organizations…run map and compass classes in about three hours on a Saturday, but they don't go anywhere near as deep as we do. The itinerary has been more or less the same for years, because honestly, map and compass doesn't change.

Q: You have Leave No Trace and Wilderness First Aid certifications. What led you to pursue those?

For Wilderness First Aid, the club originally had two members with medical backgrounds — I believe a pediatrician and a nurse practitioner — who ran WFA classes for us, which made it very affordable. They eventually aged out, and we've had to find new places to recertify since. The last time I did it was last fall, through a new program at Kalamazoo College, run through an organization called SOLO rather than NOLS/WMI, which is who I originally certified through.

Leave No Trace I found on my own, out in Lake Placid, New York at the Adirondack Mountain Club. We'd started going on more trips and seeing people using fire pits as trash bins, toilet paper left on the ground — it was gross. I wanted to learn about it properly and bring it back to incorporate into our backpacking workshop. Now I spend a good 45 minutes on it [Leave No Trace] as part of that workshop.

Q: What's your favorite part of teaching these workshops?

There are really two things that keep me doing it. One is that you get to make friends you can then go do other trips with. The other is sharing my enjoyment of the outdoors with others, and doing it responsibly — it's honestly horrifying to see people on social media doing ridiculous, irresponsible stuff outdoors, so it feels good to know we're teaching people the right way to recreate out there.

But it's really seeing people enjoy it that gets me. We took a woman in her early 20s on her first trip out to the Wind River Range, and when we stepped out of the trees at V Lake and the whole mountain range opened up in front of us, her jaw just dropped. She'd barely been outside of Michigan. That look of awe on someone's face — that's what makes it worth it. It reminds me why I'm so obsessed with getting out there myself, even stuck here in the Midwest but all I dream about are mountains all the time.

Q: What's one of your favorite trips you've personally taken?

Last year's Iceland trip stands out, even though it was pretty "bougie" as backpacking trips go — we carried tents but set them up next to mountain huts along the Laugavegur Trail, so we had flush toilets and showers every day, and could even buy a beer at the hut. It was stunning — some parts were active volcanic areas with bubbling vents and that sulfur smell, like walking through Yellowstone, and other parts were that impossibly green landscape you see in every Iceland photo. I'd go back in a heartbeat.

We've also done two trips to the Canadian Rockies, near Banff and near Jasper, that were beautiful. Permits are hard to get, but I'd go back there too without hesitation.

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